This invention relates to systems and methods that facilitate the orderly storage of information and more particularly to a system and method for generating and utilizing knowledge containers for the orderly storage and retrieval of information.
A key resource of most, if not all, enterprises is knowledge. For example, in a customer service environment, customers expect prompt and correct answers to their information requests. These information requests may relate to problems with products the customer has purchased, or to questions about products they may decide to purchase in the future. In most cases, the answer to the customer""s question exists somewhere within the enterprise. In other cases, the answer may have existed in the enterprise at one time, but is no longer there. The challenge is to find the answer and provide it to the customer in a timely manner. Further complicating the situation is the fact that very few customer service representatives possess the skills necessary to assist customers on more than a limited number of topics. Unfortunately, providing customer service representatives with the knowledge necessary to adequately serve customers involves time-consuming and expensive training. Even with training, customer service representatives will inevitably encounter questions for which no reasonable amount of training can prepare them to answer without expert consultation. The delay endured by the customer as the customer service representative consults with an expert is inconvenient, and often intolerable.
One solution to this problem has been to replace the customer service representative with a Web site of product-unique or vendor-unique reference material. Whenever the customer has a question, he/she is referred to the Web site for the answer. Another possible approach is for the vendor to maintain an email address specifically for customer inquiries, and to instruct customers to send all information requests to the email address. In addition to reducing the cost of providing customer service support, these solutions also afford the customer service representative a convenient forum for preparing a personal and comprehensive response. Unfortunately, they are considerably less timely than either of the previous two approaches, sacrifice the quality of the customer""s interaction and dehumanize the entire process.
Some enterprises employ Web search engines in an effort to provide reliable access to relevant information in the enterprise (e.g., on a company""s computer network). Unfortunately, because these web search engines check for particular textual content without the advantage of context or domain knowledge, they generally do not reliably and consistently return the desired information. This is at least partly due to the fact that languages are not only inherently ambiguous, but also because they are susceptible to expressing a single concept any number of ways using numerous and unrelated words and/or phrases. By simply searching for specific words, prior art search engines fail to identify the other alternatives that may also be helpful.
What is desired is a system that can quickly deliver timely and highly relevant knowledge upon request.
The present invention satisfies the above-described need by providing a system and method for organizing and retrieving information through the use of taxonomies, a document classifier, and an autocontextualization system.
Documents stored in the organization and retrieval subsystem may be manually through an attribute matching process or automatically classified into a predetermined number of taxonomies through a process called autocontextualization. In operation, the documents are first transformed from clear text into a structured record (knowledge container) automatically constructed indexes (tags) to help identify when the structured record is an appropriate response to a particular query. An automatic term extractor creates a list of terms that are indicative of the subject matter contained in the documents, and then a subject matter expert identifies the terms that are relevant to the taxonomies. A term analysis system assigns the relevant terms to one or more taxonomies, and a suitable algorithm is then used to determine the relatedness (weight) between each list of terms and its associated taxonomy. The system then clusters documents for each taxonomy in accordance with the weights ascribed to the terms in the taxonomy""s list and a directed acyclic graph (DAG) structure is created.
The present invention may then be used to aid a researcher or user in quickly identifying relevant documents, in response to an inputted query. It may be appreciated that both a document""s content and information added during autocontextualization is available for retrieval in the present invention. Moreover, the present system can retrieve any type of knowledge container, including not only those derived from some kind of document (such as xe2x80x9cdocumentxe2x80x9d or xe2x80x9cquestionxe2x80x9d knowledge containers) but also those that represent people and resources (such as knowledge consumer and product knowledge containers.) In a preferred embodiment, two retrieval techniques may be utilized: multiple-taxonomy browsing and query-based retrieval. In multiple-taxonomy browsing, the user specifies a taxonomic restriction to limit the knowledge containers that are eventually returned to the user. Taxonomic restrictions can be in the form of actual taxonomies (topic, filter, or lexical), Boolean relations or taxonomic relations (at, near, under, etc.) In a query-based retrieval, a user specifies a natural language query with one or more taxonomy tags, one or more taxonomic restrictions, and any knowledge container restrictions deemed necessary. In both cases, the method of retrieving documents through the use of taxonomies and knowledge containers seeks to identify matches between the query and the concept nodes in a taxonomy, to provide a faster and more relevant response than a content-based retrieval, which is driven by the actual words in the document.
Additional features and advantages of the invention will be set forth in the description which follows, and in part will be apparent from the description, or may be learned by practice of the invention. The objectives and other advantages of the invention will be realized and attained by the methods, systems, and apparatus particularly pointed out in the written description and claims hereof, as well as the appended drawings.
It is to be understood that both the foregoing general description and the following detailed description are exemplary and explanatory and are intended to provide further explanation of the invention as claimed.